We'll get to Britain whatever it takes

They have no vote. But now they're at the heart of Britain's political debate. Jason Burke travels to the grim people-warehouse near Calais to find what really drives the people desperate to come to this country

A cold, driving rain whips in across the fields. In the distance, the lights of Calais flicker wetly in the dusk. The roads, the ploughed earth and the thin strip of sea merge into a monotone slate grey and finally disappear into the gloom. It is nearly nine o'clock. By the roadside, Mohammed Ishaq, his wife and four children are waiting.

Tonight, like every night for the past two weeks, the six of them will be picked up and driven to the Eurostar terminal a mile or so away. They will, as they did last night and the night before, try to slip under the wire, crawl through the fencing, drop from bridges, secrete themselves in freight containers, hang from truck axles.

It is four months since they left their home in Afghanistan. They will do whatever it takes to make their way to Britain. They will keep trying, Mohammed Ishaq says, until they succeed.

A Mercedes pulls up, the family get in and are driven off. The car's headlights slice through the rain to reveal six Kosovan men walking in file along the road, two Iranians wrapped in bin-liners scrambling behind them, a dozen Kurds in a ragged cluster of soaked shell-suits and trainers, two Pakistanis picking their way between the puddles.

According to Claude Devos, 53, who runs Le Weekend bar on Sangatte's main street, these are not refugees, or economic migrants, or bogus asylum-seekers, or the poor and huddled masses. These are the advance guard of an invasion.

As the rain hammers against his bar's windows, he thumps a fist on his counter and makes his point again. 'It is absolutely like the Romans and the Gauls,' he says. 'This is the first wave of the army of Islam and we are being conquered. I am not a racist, I am not a political man, but I know I am speaking the truth.' Around the dim bar his clients nod, and tip their glasses in agreement.

Such rhetoric is not rare in western Europe. Interpol estimates that more than half a million people illegally entered the EU last year, up from 40,000 in 1993. A tabloid newspaper describes Sangatte as the 'village from hell', a 'war zone' where thousands of 'marauding' asylum-seekers wreak 'mayhem' before sneaking into Britain. Though John Townend MP received a slap on the wrist from Tory leader William Hague when he said mass immigration would turn Britain into a 'mongrel' race, no one doubts that his views are shared by many. With 75,000 people applying in the UK last year, everyone knows that asylum and immigration will be a key issue in the election.

Last week Tony Blair himself, aware that Labour is seen as weak on the issue, launched a counter-offensive. Writing in the Times, he said that the 1951 Geneva Convention that underpins the European asylum system should be mod ernised, and stressed that Labour's criticism of the Conservatives had been about 'opportunism', not racism.

The problem is that the arguments on all sides of the debate are founded on myths and prejudices that bear little resemblance to reality.

Just outside Sangatte is a huge steel warehouse where the Red Cross, on behalf of the French government, provides food, showers, toilets and beds for between 300 and 1,000 asylum-seekers. It was set up 18 months ago, when local authorities grew tired of the hordes sleeping rough in the village. Right-wing British politicians claim it is a waiting room for people attempting to enter the UK. And it is.

'If I don't see my friend the next morning, that means one of three things - he's made it across, the police have him, or something bad has happened,' said Zakar, a 26-year-old Chechen who has spent two weeks at the Red Cross centre. So far 26,000 people are estimated to have used the facility. Almost all are now in the UK. Last week there were about 300 there.

Before Eurotunnel invested £2 million in extra security and the ferry companies started testing for exhaled breath in lorry containers, most people used to spend only a few days at the centre. Now they spend several weeks. But they usually get to the UK in the end. But who are these people? Are they asylum-seekers? Are they 'bogus' economic migrants, refugees? Do any of these terms mean anything? Speak to any of those hanging around Sangatte and you get the same stories.

Few talk about persecution. Most talk about the sheer awfulness of their lives, a future which makes selling everything they had and entrusting their money and lives to criminals the best option. Mohammed Ishaq and his family are typical. They are Tajik Afghans, and thus from a minority who are discriminated against by the Taliban. But Ishaq does not mention persecution when he explains his flight. 'There are no schools in Kabul,' he says. 'There is no money. We were hungry and cold all the time. I wanted something better for my children.'

Ishaq sold his shop to raise the $9,000 (£6,400) 'fare' to England. He first travelled to Karachi, where a middleman took his cash and hid him and his family in the truck which took them through Iran and Turkey. That was in January. Now he has no money left.

'Going back is impossible, Everywhere there are problems,' he told The Observer .

By most definitions Ishaq is an economic migrant. If, when he arrives in Britain, he claims that he was 'persecuted' in Afghanistan, he will be a 'bogus' asylum-seeker.

The same can be said for many, if not most, of those in the Red Cross shelter. They do not claim to be fleeing an immediate threat of torture or imprisonment. Instead they are following the inexorable logic that determines today's immigration flows - 'they have very little; we have a lot'. Only a tiny minority are running from electrodes or helicopter gunships.

And Britain is seen as a 'soft touch'. Though some, especially from Pakistan and India, are drawn by affinities traceable to the days of Empire, many are not. Few at Sangatte speak English. Ishaq speaks only Urdu and Farsi. But he knows that in Germany asylum-seekers only get medical treatment in extreme cases, that in France identity cards make life as an 'illegal' difficult, and that in the UK financial aid for asylum-seekers is more generous then elsewhere.

But few of the myths of the Right stand up to scrutiny either. According to Devos the men who hang around outside his shop are ill-educated religious zealots. But in fact many of those in Sangatte are from monied, middle-class, literate backgrounds. They are intelligent and civil in every sense of the word. One young Afghan, from a family of businessmen, told The Observer he had sold his land to raise the $10,000 demanded by his trafficker. Many others are graduates.

'Engineers, doctors, professors, jurists, the amount of grey matter coming through here is impressive,' Michel Derr, director of the Sangatte camp, said recently.

Nor are the immigrants lazy, as many commentators would have us believe. As The Observer revealed last week, a survey by Exeter university found that most new arrivals in the UK are highly motivated and prepared to work hard for little money. Cheap labour is not their only use. By some estimates, Europe will need 75 million new workers to replenish its ageing 350 million population. The Government has admitted that Britain suffers a 'skills gap'.

Nor, despite the lurid picture painted in some British newspapers, is Sangatte a 'war zone'. There was very little 'marauding' - as one paper described it - going on last week. Devos proudly showed the cattle prod and pistol he keeps behind his till. But last week, all was quiet. Yet the atmosphere is as heavy as the rain-sodden fields that the clandestins cross each night on their way to the terminals. The young men set out from the Sangatte camp like conscripts heading into battle. They know the most dangerous part of their journey is still to come.

There have been scores killed on the lorries and the railways. Last month four Poles risked a hideous death clinging to the outside of a ferry. One man died after running out in front of a train in a bid to slow it down so his friends could clamber aboard. 'We don't know how many are hurt,' said Zakar, a 21-year-old Chechen. 'We never hear any news. If we don't see them again we just know they either made it or they are dead. That's all we want to know.'